Graphic design for the urban music industry

Scott Green - 25th May 2016 - 0 comments

Overview

In the beginning I was a highly skilled graphic design artist with a passion for working with the urban music industry.

2009 online portfolio

I developed an interest in making my own online portfolio in 1999 after completing a course in Adobe Flash. I had a few music video projects under my belt by 2009 and an online portfolio on a custom-made HTML website that I had built myself. It featured lots of ‘grungy’ textures and imagery that was admired to the urban music industry.

The website was a huge success and did exactly what it was designed to do – Get more music video work.

2013 online portfolio

The Splurj brand and website had a dramatic refurbishment in 2013 using more colour, including the introduction of our beloved Electric Lime colour scheme.

Graphic design for the urban music industry

Original image

I came across this stock image of a woman sitting on a couch that sparked my interest.

Maybe it was the unusual perspective that the photographer had used, or maybe it was the contrast between light and dark with a splash of colour, I can’t really put my finger on what drew me to it, but it just caught my intention and had to have something do with it and feature on the homepage of my site.

But what was I going to do with it?

I also came across a bunch images of crows in a range of different poses, and because I was trying to get more music video work I decided to use my creativity and come up with a scene where the crows were posing as a video production crew on set, and the model was the music artist being filmed.

One crow was scribbling ideas for a storyboard on the wall (something I remeber doing myself when I was at uni and thinking up ideas for my first music video for D-Tox).

In front of him was some 3D text I’d created in a graffiti style using Cinema 4D.

The 3D text helped to tie everything together a little further down the line as the wire-styled text extended down the back of the sofa, wrapped itself around the subjects leg, and then formed the wires of the headphones on the heads of the main character and another one of the crow crew.

Parts of the characters body were deconstructed as if blowing away in the wind and she was given the head of a wasp and a baseball cap so she was totally unrecognisable from the original stock image.

I’d removed a panel from her leg and added some mechanical parts (from an image of a plane engine) inside to give her a more robotic appearance. Along with the glowing eyes of the video production crew which gave them a robotic look too.

I’d hoped that the hip-hop and urban music artists that I was aiming to attract would have appreciated the sinister twist that I put on the scene whilst maintaining a clean and stylised look at the same time – something that you don’t see a lot of in the genre because artwork in primarily dark and grungy.

What happened to the website?

Rather than rebuild I decided to start a new venture instead which is when Motion Videos UK came about. The domain name said exactly what the new company was going to be and I didn’t have to spell it out like I did with Splurj so it just felt right.

I do hope to bring some of my earlier work from my graphic design career back one day. Needless to say, I won’t be hosting a website with 123-Reg ever again!

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